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Memories of a Kid on a Hot Tin Roof

Jeb Brown, in plaid jacket, in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” in Stratford, Conn., in 1974.Credit
Martha Swope/New York Public Library

A NEW Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” like the one scheduled to open on Jan. 17, will always ring with a certain importance in the theater world, but for me it brings on an additional spell of nostalgia. In 1974, at 10 years old, I landed a thrill of a summer job as one of the kids in “Cat” — those “no-neck monsters” as Tennessee Williams so memorably called them. My parents had responded to an ad for open auditions at the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Conn. I was offered the role, the production turned out to be a hit, and we transferred to New York the following fall.

My interest in the theater had been solidly awakened a few years earlier by “Pippin,” and I had already basked in the enjoyment of a couple of nice turns with local troupes. Now suddenly I had a fourth-floor walk-up dressing room in the heart of funky midtown, small and mirrored and lighted by storybook theater bulbs at its edges. There was a lumpy Equity cot for naps and a dilapidated penny arcade across the street between shows. (This was before the Starbucks green and Disney sparkle welcomed families so eagerly to the theater district.)

I was thrust into a world of adult conversations — onstage about hypodermics and highballs, backstage about contracts and guest lists. At the heart of it all I was granted a close-up angle on the professionalism that drives any first-rate theatrical event, that potent combination of craft, discipline and 360-degree collaboration. Wide-awake as this creative family formed all around me, I was having an experience that would play meaningfully in my decision to pursue a life in the theater.

At the same time I was in the fifth grade out in Cos Cob, Conn. I had one younger sister, and my family went to the Unitarian Church. My parents stumbled with their crowd through endless games of tennis on the starched public courts where players were still required to wear whites. I remember gathering around the TV with friends for the entirety of the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs tennis exhibition, catching frogs with neighborhood kids in the silt of the pond across the street and in my private hours devoting myself to the guilty pleasures of Mad magazine and TV Guide.

But in the evenings and on matinee days we would head into the city and wend our way through the wilds of Midtown, ending up at the nondescript stage door of the Anta Theater (now the August Wilson) on 52nd Street. Once inside I would climb a short flight of lime linoleum stairs, sign in at a dimly lighted burlap bulletin board, put on a jacket and bow tie and burst into an alternate realm of wealthy Southern plantation life in the year 1954.

Photo

When Jeb Brown was 10, in 1974, he spent much of the summer in an alternate realm of wealthy Southern plantation life.Credit
Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Elizabeth Ashley was at the center of it all, fighting for her life as my sharp, smart, bawdy Aunt Maggie. Uncle Brick, a gently charismatic Keir Dullea, was drinking again and drifting to an altitude not understood by children. The great Kate Reid was our deliriously affectionate grandmother, Big Mama, and Fred Gwynne the towering, taciturn and terrifying master of the house, Big Daddy. Fred was of particular fascination to us kids, as he had played Herman Munster on TV. I spent a lot of my time with him puzzled by how little of the Munster I was able to detect in his droll and contained Harvard bearing.

What I did understand was that it was Big Daddy’s birthday, his 65th, every night, and although the two-tiered cake wasn’t real, the sense of an extended family in the midst of unruly celebration was always palpable. We had fireworks, we had sparklers, we had songs and games and cap guns and pillow fights. The grown-ups had their fights as well, driven by deeper issues of greed and desire. It was all lived full throttle in front of an audience of 1,200 nightly.

“Cat” is a play that struts with a fairly frank sense of sexuality, and the “Free To Be You and Me” ’70s were an era of letting it all hang out. So to have Liz Ashley lounging and lunging through the first hour of our play in her silk slip registered to me then as in tune with the times. I understood that Uncle Brick was refusing to sleep with Aunt Maggie, and that this meant they wouldn’t have children. What I didn’t grasp were the reasons for her desperation. I gathered that Brick and his former football teammate Skipper had once had an unusually close and precious friendship, but I was ignorant of the 1950s stigma attached to “unpure” impulses that might have existed between them.

If the aspect of the play that dealt with the taboo of homosexuality in 1950s Mississippi blew unnoticed past me, the reality of a more modern attitude was all around us in the theater world of 1974. “What does gay mean?” I surprised my mother with the question one day. She responded in fairly plain terms, explaining that “some men and women want to love other men and women.” I quickly followed up: “So, do we know anyone who’s gay?” The answer was a resounding “Yes” and the examples of openly gay friends and colleagues were myriad, a number of them treasured elders working side by side with me nightly.

Other aspects of life on the Pollitt plantation remained more baffling. We had servants, played by actors who had become our good friends, with character names like Sookey and Lacey. They had very little to say during the course of the play, which I found perplexing. I had heard about and understood on some basic level the fact of slavery and the way its distorted imprint had held on longer in the South than in the North. Still, I couldn’t square this with what seemed to exist in our home: an all-black staff of uniformed employees who would speak only when spoken to, whose job it was to shepherd us children here and there and batten down the hatches as the storm approached in Act III.

The play itself granted me a fictional mother and father and an instant litter of rascally brothers and sisters. (It was then that my actual father taught me the phrase “comic relief.”) We no-necks gamely brought a gust of fun with us whenever we entered the rehearsal room. After one Wednesday matinee we invited the entire company down to our basement green room lair for our own presentation of a few key scenes from “Cat.”

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An article on Jeb Brown's casting.

To our delight most of the company came. They sat astonished as we kids performed a couple of well-rehearsed, fully costumed and imaginatively designed sequences from the masterwork we were all living upstairs nightly. I can still see Liz Ashley leaning forward on the edge of her folding chair, holding her chestnut mane from her face, beaming with equal parts shock and delight. We had absorbed, inflection by musical inflection, this very adult text — “I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.” — and were artfully parroting for our elders their own performances. I had cast myself as Big Daddy — “You tell me why you drink, and I’ll hand you one.” My bubble-gum cigar was an effective and subversive touch.

Floating through the yearlong experience was Tennessee himself, in the role of theatrical patriarch. A diminutive man in a rumpled button-down, he had his name above the title, and it was his poetry our family was speaking nightly. It’s almost hard to imagine today that he collaborated with us as a living playwright, on hand many afternoons during rehearsal weeks and then very much present for all our openings and special events.

He assembled a new third act for our production, revised the play extensively and went on record again and again with his enthusiasm for Michael Kahn’s staging. And he reserved special, worshipful praise for Liz, whom he felt was giving audiences the Maggie he had always imagined.

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Through my 10-year-old eyes he was a sweet and curious figure, at once the man responsible for this big event and also a small, quiet and apparently scared soul. It was more than once he would be reintroduced to me at a gathering and I would wonder to myself: “Why is he so shy? What’s the matter? Isn’t this his party?” Later I would come to realize that this was to be the last Broadway revival of “Cat” during his lifetime.

I’ve played many a Southerner, in the various plays and musicals I’ve done since on Broadway and across the country, but never again in Williams. And I remain grateful and amazed that at my professional beginnings the poetry of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” was in my young ear eight times a week.

A few years ago I went to the Lincoln Center performing-arts library to watch a videotape of our production. I sat at my console with real trepidation, worried that my private memories of the experience might be corrupted. But as the tape rolled, I found myself absorbed again, drawn in by the beauty of Williams’s words and the Southern, summertime world I remember like a childhood home. It’s a single-camera affair, captured in black and white, but the power of the piece and the performances register vividly.

I was amused to be reminded that Maggie’s opening lines included a swipe at us no-neck monsters. How I envy theatergoers who will be hearing those lines, getting to know those characters, for the first time this season. Me, I’ll be revisiting them, taking in the plantation and relishing time spent with its people. Like old friends. Like family.

Jeb Brown is an actor living in Brooklyn Heights with his family.

A version of this article appears in print on January 20, 2013, on Page AR6 of the New York edition with the headline: Memories of a Kid on a Hot Tin Roof. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe